Beware of Wolfe?
Nov 4, 2003: So this morning, I was looking through the LiveJournals of people who read my journal, and found this post from Natalia Lincoln about getting a harsh criticism from Gene Wolfe at the Odyssey workshop. Her response to it at the time sounds calm and reasonable and professional to me, and the feelings she wrote about in her journal only human and understandable.

But in reading the comments on the post, as she's getting both support and abuse for her reactions, I notice that her post prompted a thread on MetaFilter, essentially calling her out as a poor sport.

Going a little deeper down the rabbit hole, I find it gets worse; Mr. Wolfe apparently left the Odyssey workshop early after receiving a letter telling him that many students found his critiquing personally offensive, and would not return to class until he'd left. He realized he'd "become a liability to the workshop, [and] promised to leave at once." Ouch.

(Nota bene: I don't have any reason to think Ms. Lincoln had anything to do with said letter, and neither should you. Note also that Mr. Wolfe specifically thanks her, along with three other students, for their support.)

There are a lot of interesting questions at work here; the quasi-private/quasi-public nature of LiveJournal not the least among them, and the nature and purpose of critiques and workshops in the first place. Nick Mamatas blames the Freemasons. No, really. Well, sort of.